


With the Catching

by Satin_Swallow



Category: The Pretender (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Resolution, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 10:41:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15580167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satin_Swallow/pseuds/Satin_Swallow
Summary: After Jarod’s escape in Morocco, the chase is on again - but there’s a little alteration to the rules, and Miss Parker immediately has trouble adjusting. Then, maybe that’s precisely what Jarod is after?





	With the Catching

**Author's Note:**

> Set shortly after 'The Island of the Haunted'.
> 
> As a matter of interest -- the name Madison has its roots in the Biblical 'Matthew' meaning 'Gift from God', and the English 'Matilda' meaning 'Strong Fighter'. The French shortening of the name, 'Maddie', means 'Tower'.

_“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive.”_

(Tupac Shakur)

 

~*~*~

 

The red notebooks were blank now.

 

At first Parker had been convinced it was some new game of Jarod’s, some trifle to punish her for not wilting into his _life lesson_ , for not taking his hand and vanishing into the wind like the moribund lovers of some dire English novel - as though just leaving this horror-show was an option. She had ripped the first one to pieces among the debris of the Pretender’s lair, cursing through shimmering teeth until Sydney had started coughing up explanations. Of course, the ‘why’ was irrelevant to her, and the violence was beginning to be a rare contrast to the intense weariness that was settling into her bones. His new little _quirk_ totally compromised her ability to do her job, and with Raines wheezing threats down her neck and Lyle not far behind with his own violating little inferences, she could not help but take it personally. 

 

It was not until some weeks and three empty books later that she noticed the _challenge_ in the chastisement, and it wasn’t until she found one _in her car_ that she understood it was more a game-altering provocation. She bit down on the inside of her cheek as she recalled his admonishment of her: 

 

“ _That's the wonderful thing about life, Miss Parker. If you change the story, the ending is up to you.”_

 

He was pushing her, forcing her to acknowledge that while she patently ignored the horrifying Parker revelations from Carthis and beyond, it was she who chose to confine them to this unmitigated Purgatory. Then, what exactly did he expect her to write for him instead? He could lecture her all he wanted about ‘turning points’, the _facts_ of their world remained.

 

When she arrived home to find one sitting gaily on her coffee table, red and demanding, and provided with a jumble of letters snipped out of the paper, she actually laughed. 

 

“You know, I’m not sure you got the memo,” she seethed at the house as she dumped her coat on the sofa, “I believe it’s _you_ run. _I_ chase. So before I find a notebook wedged between the teeth of a severed _horse head_ in my sheets, I think it’s time we set that record straight. Don’t you?”

 

There was silence as she remained stuck somewhere between talking to the keys in her hand and the vile hysteria of knowing he was definitely still present.

 

“ _Jarod_ ,” she laboured his name, cautioning him not to test her. 

 

“Perhaps,” came his eventual answer and she snapped toward the sound even as he remained somewhere in the shadows. “But then I’ve never been particularly satisfied with that arrangement.” 

 

She grinned as she continued to scan the recesses for him, “To be fair, I did try to bring you in to discuss it.” 

 

“Earth-shattering success that’s turned out to be,” he countered. She had to admit that his sarcasm had come along in leaps and bounds. The silence settled into her exhaustion over the whole charade, the relentless march that seemed to yield no results.

 

She took his point. 

 

“And what exactly do you want me to put in here to change the stakes, huh?” she dropped her keys on the table and picked up the book to fire back with a little cruelty of her own, flicking through the pages to confirm the absence of life in them. “Maybe I could put together a little patchwork feature piece on The Centre’s insatiable appetite to bring you back, or the seedy, unlimited reach of their network of tentacles, or the _endlessness_ of their resources? Or perhaps it was a fairytale you were after - a little bed-time story to tuck Baby Jarod in at night?” 

 

Contrary to her hopes, she could feel his voice soften into an undoubted smile in the dark, “Come on, Miss Parker, put a little _imagination_ into it.” 

 

His flippancy darkened the corners of her eyes, “Trust me, Boy Wonder, you do _not_ want to know what’s going on in my imagination right now.” 

 

“I’m reasonably confident I have a fair idea,” his tone was unforgivably suggestive. 

 

“Oh, I see,” her aggression dug itself into her consonants at being misconstrued, “a new trick for the repertoire? You learn to read _minds_ somewhere in your latest escapade?”

 

Suddenly, he was behind her and she heard a click and the tell-tale _schlock_ of her Smith and Wesson being liberated from its holster into his grip. Her body seized into inaction, her shock palpable even as she made no move to attack, or to get away from the sound of his goading in her ear, “I learned to read _you_ years ago.” 

 

He removed the clip and cleared the round in the chamber, apparently more interested in disarming her than winning an advantage. 

 

“What do you _want_?” she tilted only her chin towards him. 

 

There was a pause, and she might have suspected another disappearing act, had she not been increasingly aware of the visceral effect his nearness was having on her. 

 

“Come with me,” he said.

 

“No,” she fired back, finally fixing him with the determined gaze he was used to, detached and defiant.

 

“Come with me,” he insisted, his own earnest look and the slight yearning in his voice working immediately to weaken her resolve. They breathed together for a moment as she fought the tension that rested between them. 

 

“There’s no where to _go_ , Jarod,” she said, and dropped the notebook back on the table before picking up her coat and wandering away from him like there were things for her to be doing and it was not unusual for him to be there. “Nothing’s changed.” 

 

“One thing has changed,” he said. 

 

She sighed loudly and turned back to him with raised brows. 

 

“You called them ‘they’.” 

 

“I what?” 

 

“You called The Centre ‘they’.” 

 

He loved to watch her mind work; even at this level of exhausted, she was right there with him. She was always right there with him, no matter how keenly she protested the truth when she heard it and no matter how often she objected that she could not make sense of his ‘riddles’. He had noted that the thing that got in the way was not her mind, but her impatience, and even now he could see her weighing up the response - what it meant, what she ought to _do_ with it. 

 

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” she deflected weakly and continued on her way to the bedroom. The response fell to the carpet beneath her feet - dead and heavy - and it drew a frown from the Pretender alongside a creeping sense of darkness he had first felt in the back of a limousine too derelict for words. It was like a plague he could feel blossoming between them, and he was certain that it would destroy them if he let it remain. He followed her, caution straining in his head that she was still dangerous, no matter how unmoved she seemed by the scenario, no matter how absent her usual team of Sweepers. 

 

“How do you do it?” he accused from her doorframe. “How do you look right in the face of it all and keep falling into line?” 

 

She stopped, a foot from her bed.

 

“I don’t have a choice,” she tried. 

 

“Yes, you do,” he refused. 

 

“Again,” she turned, gesturing widely and throwing her coat down on the bed, “all I’m hearing are the platitudes. If the lab rat has some hypotheticals he wants to throw my way - _other_ than that I go with him to spend my life on the run from my _family_ \- I’m all ears.” 

 

“Who said we’ll be running?” he asked, clearly pulling no punches this evening. “You‘re refusing something you haven’t even cared to define,” he had picked up the notebook and waved it slowly between them.

 

She gave him a whetted smile as she realised what he was doing. “Nice try,” she kicked off her heels, “but I’m not biting. Not today.”

 

“Really, Miss Parker, after everything we’ve been through, I wouldn’t have pegged you as one to be afraid of a question mark,” heantagonised. 

 

The vehemence with which her pointed forefinger snapped to her defence alongside the rapid tightening of her jaw made him flinch despite her making no advance on him, “I am _not…_ _afraid_.” 

 

Jarod stayed where he was and allowed his silence to challenge that claim. It worked within seconds. 

 

“But I’m also not _stupid_ ,” she stalked back towards him, her form formidable even without the assurance ofher Louboutins, “and unlike you, I don’t want to spend my days cooped up at the ‘Y’ helping Shirley Temple find her lost _puppy_.” 

 

She spat the last word at him, hoping to diminish everything he had been doing for five years, as though it might wound him sufficiently to let her slip passed and get out of the corner he had squared away in her own house. 

 

He would not let her go.

 

“So that’s it? They win?” he said, pushing himself bodily into her way and making sure to connect, to push her off balance. Her reflexes were instantaneous, grabbing a hold of his shoulder and initiating an aggressive counterattack.

 

‘Defensive manoeuvre’ was not in her vocabulary. 

 

Prepared for viciousness, he used her momentum to press her up against the wall, clutching her wrists together and rendering them ineffectual between them, “The Centre, Raines, Lyle - you’ll fight me, but they just win? You’re just going to let them continue to walk all over your mother’s memory?”

 

He had meant it to keep the fire in her eyes, but what he saw when she opened them decimated him. Blue was exchanged for a darker grey - lifeless and worn - and he wanted to let her go at once, to nurse that gaze back to the Carolina sky. 

 

She ended him with asphalt.

 

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” she admitted, barely vocalising. 

 

It seared through him and a feeling descended from the past, a sickening, penetrating pain that brought to mind his younger voice screaming to Sydney that they were trying to hurt her. His fist tightened around the satin of her sleeve, creased it like so many furrows in his brow. “Don’t give up on me, Parker,” he begged. 

 

She looked away from him, shadows falling across her face as she was again unable to face the weight of his demand. She was _tired_ , so very tired of fighting and failing. She remembered countless occasions, the voice of the man she had called ‘Father’ telling her she could be more, pushing her; he wanted his treasure to _shine_. 

 

“Jarod, I - ”

 

He knew the word ‘can’t’ was about to follow. 

 

On instinct, his nose fell against the throat that she had so carelessly left exposed. Then, perhaps some part of her had meant to - a weakened, bleating part that no longer cared for the life-blood there and left it to be savaged by the predators. It was agony in the realising. It had never occurred to him that they might take her from him while she still breathed. She had stopped speaking, however, halted before she had damned the entire crusade. He could feel her pulse thudding on quietly without her, and in a moment of hallowed praise for it, he pressed his lips against the fragile spot. 

 

Her intake of breath might havesliced through steel. 

 

It was not desire. Desire she had felt. Desire had clawed at her in desperate need for years, a hungry and demanding master that had crushed her into submission and thrown her to any wolf that would satisfy. She had managed the illusion of control over it, hardened her face to show that nothing took command of her, nothing used her, and certainly nothing _hurt_ her. But as he breathed against her, taking no further liberty, she felt the surfacing of some deep, interior shrapnel, working its way through every layer of skin. Her tears were swift and silent, falling hot from her cheek to mingle with his kiss before the rattle of air from her lungs collapsed on them both. 

 

“Yes, _breathe_ ,” he pleaded as he retreated to look at her. 

 

“Stop it!” she snapped back to face him in the space she was given to move, shields of earlier obsidian descending to crush the invasion. It was the Miss Parker he knew: violence and bile to put an end to the wounding. “I am so sick of this _game._ Has it never crossed your mind that I don’t _need_ you? That if it weren’t for you, I would be out of this Hell and living _my_ life, instead of yours?” 

 

He would not bow to her again. 

 

“Don’t you think it’s about time we put that lie to bed?” he said.

 

She laughed, dropping her head back slightly before immediately taking control, returning her glance to his with a commanding heat and pressing seductively up against him as she threatened to brush her lips against his, “Wouldn’t you just love that?” 

 

He used his grip on her hands to force her gently back against the wall and away from him, just to look at her. His eyes were full of everything he wanted for her, away from The Centre, from the weighted lies of so many years, poisoning her and simultaneously demanding that she pay tribute for the privilege. The change was notable. He was no longer going to let her fall back on a response that was killing her, “Don’t give up on me, Parker.” 

 

She did not resist, her face sinking into the demolished defeat he had seen when Thomas had died, and then the truth: “I can’t, Jarod. I’ve… _failed -_ just like my mother. I can’t put this thing where it belongs, I can’t _win_. And every time I try and face them, it turns out that it was all a part of some _Master Plan_ , and I fall more and more into this sickening _septic tank_ of a life that I never asked for. So, you see? Your little… prompt, your little _invitation_ to write a whole new story? There is nothing that anyone has done to me in the entirety of my time at The Centre that could be _half_ as cruel.” 

 

His own tears were visible now, unrestrained and honest. 

 

“Madison, please.” 

 

He may as well have struck her, the shock echoing across her face within seconds and wiping clear all emotion save itself. “What did you call me?” 

 

“Mad -”

 

“Don’t,” she defended, her teeth preparing for every kind of merciless, “don’t you _dare_!” She shoved him, and Jarod did nothing to fight back, simply accepting what he knew would come when he spoke the word he had kept silently within him since he was eleven years old. The rage that it summoned was unlike any he had seen on her, and the cry that tore through the room was elemental as she seized a bedside lamp, casting it against the wall to hear it smash with shattering satisfaction. “I can bet you’ve been waiting _years_ to use that little gem on me!” she spun back around, all but crunching over in half as she demanded an answer of him. 

 

There was nothing he wanted less than to give it. 

 

“They were running a simulation,” he started, hesitating further before he revealed what they had both known and yet never truly talked about, “when we met.” She wilted into the familiar feeling, the darkness descending still further as the game was uncovered - not her game, _never_ her game. Always it was the same, the quiet unveiling of a web that she had been happily spinning while the spider lay in lurk behind her, feeding. Her tears brought her shoulders into an involuntary shaking. “They were testing The Centre’s security clearance levels,” he continued, “of course your… Mr Parker’s was the most formidable target for any potential hacker, so they were going to use me to see if it was impenetrable. They knew when I saw you - ”

 

“That if they withheld my name,” she was straining for control, “you’d go looking for it.”

 

“And since it was neatly wrapped up in Mr Parker’s personnel files…” he confirmed, “but - ”

 

“I gave up the goods before the game _got_ good,” she barked with a familiar self-loathing, running her fingers through her hair and gripping tight to the roots as she remembered whispering a hallowed secret to the little boy she had felt for. How many times had she supplied the ammunition for her own execution? 

 

As the darker reality of the rest surfaced in her mind, she refused to express it right away - as though concealing it a few more seconds might render it untrue. 

 

Instead, she collapsed heavily into sitting on the end of her bed, her head in her hands. The remnants of her shock came through in waves of air desperately trying to expel itself from her lungs, as though doing so would clear the growing mould within them. From behind slender fingers, her voice was shaken, “Daddy always called me ‘Angel’. Only my mother ever called me Madison. And even then, only when she was sure we were alone. It was like our little secret, a way of keeping something for _us_. Some small _shred_ of…” The tears began anew, barring the rest. 

 

“I never told them,” Jarod confessed, and it set still the air.

 

She looked up at him from behind her crushed defences.

 

“And I won’t say it again,” he said, “it’s yours.”

 

It was offered with such finality, she simply let it hang as she once more reassessed the man standing before her. It had become rather a habit, she had noticed, this casting and recasting him - a Pretender in her estimation of him as much as he was in their little hunt. Though she was aware that the pretend in her mind was entirely hers, because she had known - _always known_ \- who he was in actuality, no matter how deceit and bitter circumstance had tried to teach her otherwise. 

 

“You’re going to ask me again, aren’t you?” she huffed a faint laugh. 

 

He smiled, “Come with me?”

 

She paused, swallowed and then, “No.” 

 

His eyes betrayed his wounding, but it was not at her hands. “I’m going to keep asking,” he warned. 

 

She stood, and crossed to him with a softer intent, her limbs having spent the energy she had left, “I would heartily recommend that you don’t do that.”

“What’s left for you there?” he pressed.

 

“Nothing. I think we both know that there’s never been anything for either of us,” she said before looking earnestly at him, “the illusion - and it was the same illusion that killed my mother - was that we might be able to squeeze out something of our own.”

 

“And can’t we?” 

 

She tilted her head, her tears glistening as they refreshed against her lashes, “Jarod, why did you never just walk away? Disappear into the great beyond and never look back? And don’t mock my intelligence by trying to suggest that it had anything to do with our ability to track you. You could have been gone in a second. But instead we got breadcrumbs, the notebooks, the gifts.”

 

He frowned, “I needed answers.” 

 

“And did you find them?” 

 

“Some.” 

 

“So why are you still here?” she struck.

 

His face gave away every longing, every hope and impossible aspiration that had lingered at their periphery since they had brought her down from the Tower to catch him. He strove to hide none of it, and as he was so prone to doing, he left himself open to her disdain, utterly vulnerable. 

 

In response, she pressed the heel of her hand against her lips, forcing her fingers around the back of her neck as she turned away from him and fought the illusion of which she had just been speaking. “Don’t you see,” she said, “they knew you would never be free if they just gave you something to come back for. Your past. Your mother. Your father. Sydney -” She breathed in, like she was pulling a shard from her abdomen. 

 

“And you.” 

 

“You just know they’ve been orchestrating this little nightmare from the beginning,” she agreed. “They knew I couldn’t resist the hunt, and theyknew that by putting us together -” 

 

“That will be their mistake,” he said, and his voice was full of the surety she had never understood in him. Full of endless optimism. Full of faith. 

 

“Walk away, Jarod.”

 

“Not without you.” 

 

“That’s what they _want_ ,” she allowed the emotion to sweep away her voice once more, “They’re just waiting for you to take that risk and they’ll win, Jarod. They always win.”

 

“Not this time.”

 

“ _Every time_. We can’t - ” 

 

There was nothing to say to that word but a kiss, and he took it before anything else could step between them. He expected a fight, but found instead an unpredictability that made her every act of cruelty pedestrian in its unoriginality, something foreign to her while this moment coalesced without calculation. In fact, her frame felt smaller than ever he had remembered it, and yet solid in its reality. The gentility of the way she reciprocated all but broke his heart as he connected with the woman he had been searching for since he had last seen her disappear through a door and into The Centre’s plans for her. He could still feel the tears on her face, and it forced him to draw her closer, to pull her back from whatever precipice they had put her on and burrow her away within himself - in the same hidden place that had so long preserved her name. When she broke away, he immediately felt the threat of letting her slip from his fingers, a pang of so many years, and the little girl screaming over Catherine Parker’s murder. 

 

“Jarod,” her voice was something else, something new, and she did not extricate herself from him, did not force her hand from his as she had done when he had finally reached out and given her the chance to walk away. He gently caressed her face, still sad, and pressed the fringe back from her forehead. He knew what was coming. “You have to let me go,” she whispered, and it was Catherine all over.

 

He took in that sacrifice, that gift of herself that he could never have imagined five years before, when she had been a hellcat rising from the flames and breathing sulphur with a nicotine edge. It was an irony indeed that she was ready to fall back into that pit at the very moment she had finally left it behind. 

 

“You don’t belong to them,” he said. 

 

“And who do I _belong_ to?” she challenged, and yet he was not entirely sure it was rhetorical. 

 

They stood for a moment before Jarod reached to take her by the wrist, placing her hand over her own heart. She watched him move and then remembered a stained glass portrait resting against a tree in her most desperate moment. She blinked at the thought, at the truth that this heart was hers. 

 

“Missing pieces, Miss Parker,” he said. 

 

When she started to laugh, he felt uncertain that he had said the right thing; it had been some time since he had felt such incongruity with the space around him, and his sure strength flickered in his eyes enough to make her reach up and touch his cheek, as though to ground his features. “You really are always this wholesome, aren’t you?” she grinned. 

 

He allowed a smile, suddenly shy.

 

When she kissed him again, it was to draw from him that very essence. “I am afraid,” she admitted against his lips.

 

He creased her hair between his fingers. “I’ve been afraid every day for five years,” he mirrored, “but I’m here, and not where I began.”

 

She sighed through the anxiety of his honesty with her. 

 

“Come with me,” he said, neither question nor demand, and she knew that they would not be running from anything - she could sense The Centre’s downfall in his voice. The time for hiding, for surviving, was at its end. 

 

“You know they’ll never stop,” she said. 

 

“Neither will we.” 

 

*~*~*


End file.
